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An Artist and Two Rats – A tale for children

 

There lived an artist. He was funny-looking in appearance. His hands were often soiled with paints, and on the tip of his nose there was usually a black smudge from the chalk that he used to draw his sketches. The artist was very forgetful. He could forget to eat lunch. He could forget to go to sleep when it was dark and everyone else was asleep. He could forget a lot of things. In addition to his forgetfulness, he also had a strange quality: although we wasn’t deaf, sometimes he would be thinking so hard, he wouldn’t hear when he was spoken to. He might simply be thinking about a new picture and not answer a question. So people sometimes assumed that he was, in fact, deaf, and started to talk louder to him. And this was very funny.

The artist lived in a large studio with enormous windows right under the attic of a five-story building. Sometimes he walked up the stairs to the dark and mysterious attic. The attic lured him with its secret treasures.

 

A bottle of milk, fresh bread, some fruit, a few boiled eggs, and a piece of smoked meet—all very appetizing looking—were brought to his door daily. He almost never left his studio. In this habitat, an artist is almost like a crawfish: never getting out of its shell, filled with secretive plans and ideas.

 

The artist lived like this—like a hermit—for many years, because he was a man who dedicated himself to one obsession: he wanted to paint many pictures. He dreamed a lot about a time when he would come out from his studio with a thousand paintings and stun the entire world with his art. He didn’t even think about fun and pleasantries. He could think of nothing but his pictures. Outsiders thought he was a little odd, but people around him knew that he was very kind and funny. But they also knew that it was pointless to talk to him; even if they only asked how is he was doing, he might answer with an unrelated question like: “Does it look like it going to rain? Looks cloudy!” He was always concerned with the rain, because he knew that clouds would block the sun, and there would be no light in his studio. He would not be able to work on his pictures, because it is very important for an artist to have a lot of daylight to see the true color of paints. Artificial light changes colors; blue seems a bit green in the yellowish light, for instance.

 

 

Sometimes the artist felt very lonely. He had no friends, and sometimes he desperately wanted to chat with someone. As he occasionally could forget to eat his food, it sometimes remained on the table until the next day. But the next day the artist would notice that the bread, cheese, and eggs had been chewed on a little. He thought that he might not be as lonely as it seemed. After that, even if he ate all the food he would leave some crumbs on the table.

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Uploaded on April 6, 2015
Taken on August 19, 2014